Computer Sciences Commons^™

Integrating Computing Into Preservice Teacher Preparation Programs Across The Core: Language, Mathematics, And Science, Lauren E. Margulieux, Patrick Enderle, Pier Junor Clarke, Natalie King, Caroline Sullivan, Michelle Zoss, Joyce Many

Journal of Computer Science Integration

This paper describes the beginning of a design-based research project for integrating computing activities in preservice teacher programs throughout a middle and secondary education department. Computing integration activities use computing tools, like programming, to support learning in non-computing disciplines. The paper begins with the motivation for integrating computing that encouraged widespread buy-in, design goals, and design parameters. The primary motivating factor for this work was preparing teachers to use technology to support learning in their classrooms. Involving computing education faculty in the preparation enabled the activities to include computer science and spread computational literacy. The paper also describes the process …

Secure Cloud-Based Iot Water Quality Gathering For Analysis And Visualization, Soin Abdoul Kassif Baba M Traore, Maria Valero, Amy Gruss

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Water quality refers to measurable water characteristics, including chemical, biological, physical, and radiological characteristics usually relative to human needs. Dumping waste and untreated sewage is the reason for water pollution and several diseases to the living hood. The quality of water can also have a significant impact on animals and plant ecosystems. Therefore, keeping track of water quality is a substantial national interest. Much research has been done for measuring water quality using sensors to prevent water pollution. In summary, those systems are built based on online and reagent-free water monitoring SCADA systems in wired networks. However, centralized servers, transmission …

Cybercrime In The Developing World, David A. Ghelerter, John E. Wilson, Noah L. Welch, John-David Rusk

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This paper attempts to discover the reasons behind the increase in cybercrime in developing nations over the past two decades. It discusses many examples and cases of projects to increase internet access in developing countries and how they enabled cybercrime. This paper examines how nations where many cybercrimes occurred, did not have the necessary resources or neglected to react appropriately. The other primary focus is how cybercrimes are not viewed the same as other crimes in many of these countries and how this perception allows cybercriminals to do as they please with no stigma from their neighbors. It concludes that …

Microtransactions And Gambling In The Video Game Industry, Christopher L. Antepenko, Samuel R. Rickey, Angel L. Hibbets, John-David Rusk

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The beginning of the 21st century has had a drastic effect on the video game industry. The advent of almost universal Internet access, the release of inexpensive broadband-enabled consoles, and the availability of mobile gaming have led to game developers and publishers heavily relying on premium in-game currencies, exclusive paid items, and loot boxes to subsidize or even replace profits from traditional video game business models. By 2020, in-game purchases made up a market of $92.6B worldwide and, in the US, experienced growth of over 30%.[1] In this highly lucrative market, the legal and ethical landscape is constantly bubbling with …

Social Media Platforms And Responsibility For Disinformation, Matt T. Figlia, Brandon M. Henschen, Joseph T. Sims, John-David Rusk

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Researchers are paying closer attention to the rise of disinformation on social media platforms and what responsibility, if any, the companies that control these platforms have for false information being spread on their websites. In this paper, we highlight the recent growth in concern regarding online disinformation, discuss other works regarding the use of social media as a tool for spreading disinformation, and discuss how coordinated disinformation campaigns on social media platforms are used to spread propaganda and lies about current political events. We also evaluate the reactions of social media platforms in combatting disinformation and the difficulty in policing …

Using Experts For Improving Project Cybersecurity Risk Scenarios, Steven S. Presley, Jeffrey P. Landry, Jordan Shropshire, Philip Menard

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This study implemented an expert panel to assess the content validity of hypothetical scenarios to be used in a survey of cybersecurity risk across project meta-phases. Six out of 10 experts solicited completed the expert panel exercise. Results indicate that although experts often disagreed with each other and on the expected mapping of scenario to project meta-phase, the experts generally found risk present in the scenarios and across all three project meta-phases, as hypothesized.

Authentication Based On Periocular Biometrics And Skin Tone, Kennedy Marsh, Clifton Wallace, Jeffrey Hernandez, Rodney Dejournett, Xiaohong Yuan, Kaushik Roy

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Face images with masks have a major effect on the identification and authentication of people with masks covering key facial features such as noses and mouths. In this paper, we propose to use periocular region and skin tone for authenticating users with masked faces. We first extract the periocular region of faces with masks, then detect the skin tone for each face. We then train models using machine learning algorithms Random Forest, XGBoost, and Decision Trees using skin tone information and perform classification on two datasets. Experiment results show these models had good performance.

Towards Assessing Organizational Cybersecurity Risks Via Remote Workers’ Cyberslacking And Their Computer Security Posture, Ariel Luna, Yair Levy, Gregory Simco, Wei Li

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Cyberslacking is conducted by employees who are using their companies’ equipment and network for personal purposes instead of performing their work duties during work hours. Cyberslacking has a significant adverse effect on overall employee productivity, however, recently, due to COVID19 pandemic move to remote working also pose a cybersecurity risk to organizations networks and infrastructure. In this work-in-progress research study, we are developing, validating, and will empirically test taxonomy to assess an organization’s remote workers’ risk level of cybersecurity threats. This study includes a three-phased developmental approach in developing the Remote Worker Cyberslacking Security Risk Taxonomy. With feedback from cybersecurity …

Towards The Development And Assessment Of A Method For Educating Users Into Choosing Complex, Memorable Passphrases, Juan M. Madrid, Yair Levy, Laurie Dringus, Ling Wang

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The currently most used method for authentication is the password because it is simple to implement, and computer users are very familiarized with it. However, passwords are vulnerable to attacks that can be mitigated by increasing the complexity of the chosen password, particularly in terms of length. One possible approach to accomplish this is through the usage of passphrases, which can be easier to remember than a standard password, thus reducing the loss of work time and productivity related to forgotten passwords. To achieve the required balance between complexity and memorability, the concept of passphrase categories can be used, i.e. …

Nids In Airgapped Lans--Does It Matter?, Winston Messer

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This paper presents an assessment of the methods and benefits of adding network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) to certain high-security airgapped isolated local area networks. The proposed network architecture was empirically tested via a series of simulated network attacks on a virtualized network. The results show an improvement of double the chances of an analyst receiving a specific, appropriately-severe alert when NIDS is implemented alongside host-based measures when compared to host-based measures alone. Further, the inclusion of NIDS increased the likelihood of the analyst receiving a high-severity alert in response to the simulated attack attempt by four times when compared …

What You See Is Not What You Know: Deepfake Image Manipulation, Cathryn Allen, Bryson Payne, Tamirat Abegaz, Chuck Robertson

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Research indicates that deceitful videos tend to spread rapidly online and influence people’s opinions and ideas. Because of this, video misinformation via deepfake video manipulation poses a significant online threat. This study aims to discover what factors can influence viewers’ capability of distinguishing deepfake videos from genuine video footage. This work focuses on exploring deepfake videos’ potential use for deception and misinformation by exploring people’s ability to determine whether videos are deepfakes in a survey consisting of deepfake videos and original unedited videos. The participants viewed a set of four videos and were asked to judge whether the videos shown …

Editors' Preface, Michael E. Whitman, Herbert J. Mattord, Hossain Shahriar

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Since 2004, Kennesaw State University, Georgia, has hosted an academic conference. Over the years, the event has brought together hundreds of faculty and students from throughout the U.S., sharing research into pedagogical efforts and instructional innovations. Initially, the conference was named the Information Security Curriculum Development conference and served as KSU’s contribution to engage our colleagues in growing security education from its infancy. It was paired with KSU’s inaugural security education journal, the Information Security Education Journal. In 2016, the event was rebranded as the Conference on Cybersecurity Education, Research, and Practice to reflect both an expansion of topics suitable …

Unoapi: Balancing Performance, Portability, And Productivity (P3) In Hpc Education, Konstantin Laufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

oneAPI is a major initiative by Intel aimed at making it easier to program heterogeneous architectures used in high-performance computing using a unified application programming interface (API). While raising the abstraction level via a unified API represents a promising step for the current generation of students and practitioners to embrace high- performance computing, we argue that a curriculum of well- developed software engineering methods and well-crafted exem- plars will be necessary to ensure interest by this audience and those who teach them. We aim to bridge the gap by developing a curriculum—codenamed UnoAPI—that takes a more holistic approach by looking …

Physics-Informed Neural Networks For Informed Vaccine Distribution In Heterogeneously Mixed Populations, Alvan Arulandu, Padmanabhan Seshaiyer

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Rural America Is Still Technologically Behind: Why It Matters Now More Than Ever, Paul Force-Emery Mackie

Social Work Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Understanding The Behavior, Challenges, And Privacy Risks In Digital Technology Use By Nursing Professionals, Ankit Shrestha, Danielle M. Graham, Prakriti Dumaru, Rizu Paudel, Kristin A. Searle, Mahdi Nasrullah Al-Ameen

Computer Science Student Research

With the growing adoption of digital technology in healthcare organizations, it is important to understand nursing professionals’ behavior and challenges, and the corresponding privacy implications around digital technology use. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 participants (16 nursing professionals, and five nursing faculties) in the USA. In our study with nursing professionals, we explored how they used digital technology and protected sensitive health data at their workplace. We investigated their understanding of privacy breaches and possible consequences, the challenges they encountered to maintaining privacy, and their workarounds to deal with such issues. We looked into the support …

Plasmon Damping Rates In Coulomb-Coupled 2d Layers In A Heterostructure, Dipendra Dahal, Godfrey Gumbs, Andrii Iurov, Chin-Sen Ting

Publications and Research

The Coulomb excitations of charge density oscillation are calculated for a double-layer heterostructure. Specifically, we consider two-dimensional (2D) layers of silicene and graphene on a substrate. From the obtained surface response function, we calculated the plasmon dispersion relations, which demonstrate how the Coulomb interaction renormalizes the plasmon frequencies. Most importantly, we have conducted a thorough investigation of how the decay rates of the plasmons in these heterostructures are affected by the Coulomb coupling between different types of two- dimensional materials whose separations could be varied. A novel effect of nullification of the silicene band gap is noticed when graphene is …

An Empirical Study Of Artifacts And Security Risks In The Pre-Trained Model Supply Chain, Wenxin Jiang, Nicholas Synovic, Rohan Sethi, Aryan Indarapu, Matt Hyattt, Taylor R. Schorlemmer, George K. Thiruvathukal, James C. Davis

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance on many tasks, but require increasingly complex architectures and costly training procedures. Engineers can reduce costs by reusing a pre-trained model (PTM) and fine-tuning it for their own tasks. To facilitate software reuse, engineers collaborate around model hubs, collections of PTMs and datasets organized by problem domain. Although model hubs are now comparable in popularity and size to other software ecosystems, the associated PTM supply chain has not yet been examined from a software engineering perspective.

We present an empirical study of artifacts and security features in 8 model hubs. We indicate the potential …

The Smart Dementia Care Project, Dympna O'Sullivan, Jonathan Turner, Ciaran Nugent, Damon Berry, Michael Wilson, Julie Doyle

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Role Of It In Campus Sustainability Efforts: Model Sustainability In It Operations, Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, And Teaching And Learning, J. T. Singh, Kevin Partridge, Teresa Hudson, Pete Calvert

Sustainability Research & Practice Seminar Presentations

JT Singh (and colleagues), WCU Information Services and Technology - The Role of IT in Campus Sustainability Efforts

Farmer Adoption Of Advanced Technology In Agribusiness, Justin W. Belcher

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Normally, family-owned farms are slow to adopt advanced technologies though these technologies can provide several benefits to the farm and have the potential to increase farm production volumes to help meet future population growth. The goal of this study was to document the factors that influence the adoption decision of advanced technologies by family-owned farms and what strategies can be used to motivate adoption. Case study research was conducted to gather data in a more structured way from family-owned farms typically excluded from past research for the purpose of comparing similarities across similar and dissimilar farms. For generalizing similarities, a …

A Comprehensive Artificial Intelligence Framework For Dental Diagnosis And Charting, Tanjida Kabir, Chun-Teh Lee, Luyao Chen, Xiaoqian Jiang, Shayan Shams

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to develop artificial intelligence (AI) guided framework to recognize tooth numbers in panoramic and intraoral radiographs (periapical and bitewing) without prior domain knowledge and arrange the intraoral radiographs into a full mouth series (FMS) arrangement template. This model can be integrated with different diseases diagnosis models, such as periodontitis or caries, to facilitate clinical examinations and diagnoses.

METHODS: The framework utilized image segmentation models to generate the masks of bone area, tooth, and cementoenamel junction (CEJ) lines from intraoral radiographs. These masks were used to detect and extract teeth bounding boxes utilizing several …

Deep Learning‑Based Framework For Slide‑Based Histopathological Image Analysis, Sai Kosaraju, Jeongyeon Park, Hyun Lee, Jung Wook Yang, Mingon Kang

Computer Science Faculty Research

Digital pathology coupled with advanced machine learning (e.g., deep learning) has been changing the paradigm of whole-slide histopathological images (WSIs) analysis. Major applications in digital pathology using machine learning include automatic cancer classification, survival analysis, and subtyping from pathological images. While most pathological image analyses are based on patch-wise processing due to the extremely large size of histopathology images, there are several applications that predict a single clinical outcome or perform pathological diagnosis per slide (e.g., cancer classification, survival analysis). However, current slide-based analyses are task-dependent, and a general framework of slide-based analysis in WSI has been seldom investigated. We …

Designing A Messaging Strategy To Improve Information Security Policy Compliance, Federico Giovannetti

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Lack of employee compliance with information security policies is a key factor driving security incidents. Information security practitioners struggle to enforce policy compliance while employees try to curtail safeguards in favor of expediency and other perceived business goals. Several studies have shown individual and organizational factors influencing this type of employee behavior. However, few have recommended management-level interventions that can be used as a solution framework by information security practitioners.

This research utilized the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology to develop a management-level intervention based on a messaging strategy that aims to help information security practitioners improve the information security …

Development Of An Automated Platform For Sensing And Differentiating Vapor-Phase Btex Constituents, Jonathan Samuelson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Light aromatic hydrocarbons are an inevitable byproduct of fossil fuel extraction, refinement, distribution, and use. The four lightest and most prevalent of these are benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene, which are known collectively as BTEX. In spite of their chemical similarity these species have markedly different effects on human health and substantially different concentrations are permitted by OSHA in workplaces and by the EPA in ambient air and groundwater. Real-time detection, identification, and quantification of these species is therefore of great importance wherever they see industrial use.This work represents the continuation and advancement of a line of research in which …

It’S Your Turn, Are You Ready To Get Vaccinated? Towards An Exploration Of Vaccine Hesitancy Using Sentiment Analysis Of Instagram Posts, Mohammed Talha Alam, Shahab Saquib Sohail, Syed Ubaid, Shakil, Zafar Ali, Mohammad Hijji, Abdul Khader Jilani Saudagar, Khan Muhammad

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

The deadly threat caused by the rapid spread of COVID-19 has been restricted by virtue of vaccines. However, there is misinformation regarding the certainty and positives outcome of getting vaccinated; hence, many people are reluctant to opt for it. Therefore, in this paper, we identified public sentiments and hesitancy toward the COVID-19 vaccines based on Instagram posts as part of intelligent surveillance. We first retrieved more than 10k publicly available comments and captions posted under different vaccine hashtags (namely, covaxin, covishield, and sputnik). Next, we translated the extracted comments into a common language (English), followed by the calculation of the …

Location Heartbleeding: The Rise Of Wi-Fi Spoofing Attack Via Geolocation Api, Xiao Han, Junjie Xiong, Wenbo Shen, Zhuo Lu, Yao Liu

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Location spoofing attack deceiving a Wi-Fi positioning system has been studied for over a decade. However, it has been challenging to construct a practical spoofing attack in urban areas with dense coverage of legitimate Wi-Fi APs. This paper identifies the vulnerability of the Google Geolocation API, which returns the location of a mobile device based on the information of the Wi-Fi access points that the device can detect. We show that this vulnerability can be exploited by the attacker to reveal the black-box localization algorithms adopted by the Google Wi-Fi positioning system and easily launch the location spoofing attack in …

Task Progress Assessment And Monitoring Using Self-Supervised Learning, Sainath Reddy Bobbala

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Robotic manipulation for cooking requires a thorough understanding of the cooking environment. The robot must understand the cooking objects and their states at each intermediate level as the process continues. To understand these states, we need frame-level annotations. To overcome this frame-level dependency, we introduce a self-supervised learning method to obtain the frame-level state representation with ”temporal video alignment” and ”contrastive learning.”In this work, we use self-supervised learning to train a model using multiple videos of the same action being performed in various settings. This model can extract frame-level embedding space and align videos via simple distance-based matching. We show …

Missing Teeth And Restoration Detection Using Dental Panoramic Radiography Based On Transfer Learning With Cnns, Shih-Lun Chen, Tsung-Yi Chen, Yen-Cheng Huang, Chiung-An Chen, He-Sheng Chou, Ya-Yun Huang, Wei-Chi Lin, Tzu-Chien Li, Jia-Jun Yuan, Patricia Angela R. Abu

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Common dental diseases include caries, periodontitis, missing teeth and restorations. Dentists still use manual methods to judge and label lesions which is very time-consuming and highly repetitive. This research proposal uses artificial intelligence combined with image judgment technology for an improved efficiency on the process. In terms of cropping technology in images, the proposed study uses histogram equalization combined with flat-field correction for pixel value assignment. The details of the bone structure improves the resolution of the high-noise coverage. Thus, using the polynomial function connects all the interstitial strands by the strips to form a smooth curve. The curve solves …

Generative Spatio-Temporal And Multimodal Analysis Of Neonatal Pain, Md Sirajus Salekin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Neonates can not express their pain like an adult person. Due to the lacking of proper muscle growth and inability to express non-verbally, it is difficult to understand their emotional status. In addition, if the neonates are under any treatment or left monitored after any major surgeries (post-operative), it is more difficult to understand their pain due to the side effect of medications and the caring system (i.e. intubated, masked face, covered body with blanket, etc.). In a clinical environment, usually, bedside nurses routinely observe the neonate and measure the pain status following any standard clinical pain scale. But current …